On Tuesday, Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum suggested that we don't have effective copyright enforcement on the Internet because we just haven't tried hard enough:

Something that's good enough to provide a measure of IP protection that works for the vast majority of non-supermen and isn't too unwieldy. Is that really any more unlikely than the invention of the internet itself? I'm not sure why.

This is not something you want to believe if, ideologically, you're opposed to IP protection because you think that digital content is fundamentally different from meatspace content on the grounds that making a digital copy of something doesn't reduce anyone else's ability to use their copy. But neither does copying a book. That's never been the point of IP law. It's always been about the income stream an author can get from selling copies of his or her work, and that's exactly the same in the digital world as it is in the physical world. The arguments in favor of IP protection are much the same in both domains.

You might not want to hear that, but just because you don't want to hear it doesn't mean it's not true. The truth is that IP protection in the digital world might very well be possible. We won't know until we try, making a whole lot of mistakes along the way. If you want to argue that IP protection is a bad idea, then fine. Make the argument. But don't pretend that your preferences are also technological certitudes. They aren't.

The phrase that jumped out at me was "we won't know until we try." Among people who don't pay close attention to technology issues, there seems to be a widespread impression that the copyright debate pits those who think we should enforce copyright against those who are ideologically opposed to copyright protection. But the reality is that we've been "trying" to crack down on illicit file sharing for at least two decades, granting copyright holders stronger and stronger enforcement powers and devoting more and more taxpayer dollars to the effort.

This might not be obvious to those who only write about these issues on occasion. So in the interest of a better-informed debate, here's a partial list of significant US anti-piracy efforts made over the last couple of decades:

1992: Congress passed the Audio Home Recording Act, which mandated that digital audio devices have copy protection baked into them, and it also imposed a tax on blank media to offset harms from digital piracy.

1997: The recording industry tried to sue the first MP3 players out of existence. Fortunately, courts argued that "space shifting" is a fair use. (This was a sequel to Hollywood's effort to have the VCR declared illegal on copyright grounds in the early 1980s.)

1998: Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which effectively gave Hollywood the power to control the design of entertainment devices; all that was needed was to link new technologies with particular DRM schemes. Manufacturers couldn't crack the DRM, thanks to the new law, so they had to take out a license for its use, complete with a whole set of unrelated conditions. This is why, for example, most DVD players will refuse to fast-forward through commercials in a DVD if the publisher sets the "don't allow fast-forwarding" flag. Hollywood has used its rights under the DMCA to create a licensing regime for DVD players that allows it to micro-manage the design of DVD players, and consumer electronics firms that try to create a DVD player without Hollywood's permission are subject to civil and criminal penalties.

2000: The recording industry forced My.MP3.com out of business. My.MP3.com was one of the first "cloud music" services. It wasn't a file-sharing site. Rather, it allowed users to listen to their own music collections while on the road. The decision probably delayed the emergence of cloud music services like Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player by a decade.

2004: Hollywood sued Kaleidescape for creating a "DVD jukebox" product that allowed users to rip DVDs and stream them to various devices around their household. That litigation is ongoing, and likely prevented the emergence of similar products.

2005: content companies shut down the file-sharing service Grokster and several of its competitors after a lengthy court battle.

2008: Congress passed the PRO-IP Act, which gives the government the power to seize US-based domain names after a one-sided ex parte legal process similar to the one used to seize the property of drug dealers. The PRO-IP Act also jacks up the penalties for other copyright offenses, and it created a new "IP Czar" position in the executive branch.

2010: The federal government began seizing domains of accused pirate sites using the powers granted by PRO-IP. The program has resulted in several dubious seizures and a couple of outright errors, though has also taken down sites like NinjaVideo in advance of prosecution and later guilty pleas from its principals.

2011: The US government sought the extradition of a British college student for operating a "link site." Neither he nor his servers were located in the United States during the time he ran the site, and it's not clear if he violated British law.

2012: The United States raided and shut down Megaupload, a file-hosting site that hosted a lot of infringing content and was one of the most heavily trafficked sites in the world. The principals of the site were arrested and at least their CEO has been denied bail.

This is a partial list, focusing on the most significant anti-piracy efforts undertaken in recent years. To be clear, my point isn't that all of these policies are bad. I think the case against Napster and Grokster was pretty strong (and said so at the time in the case of Grokster). The US version of the "graduated response" system seems fairly reasonable to me, and I haven't always found locker and link sites' legal arguments persuasive.

But the broader point is clear: every item on this list has imposed costs on third parties. Technologies with clear non-infringing uses have been pushed out of the market. Innocent parties have had their websites shut down. A woman was arrested for filming a birthday party that happened to occur in a movie theater. Angel investor Paul Graham has said he avoids funding music-related startups because the record labels are "effectively a rogue state with nuclear weapons." And most of these enforcement efforts costs taxpayer money.

Individually, none of these things might be worth getting upset over. But in the aggregate, they reflect a disproportionate focus on the interests of a handful of large companies. It's hard to think of a single example during this twenty-year period of copyright restrictions being repealed, relaxed, or any in any meaningful way liberalized. Reform proposals like the orphan works bill have languished.

Drum suggests that opposition to further increases in copyright enforcement comes from people who are "ideologically opposed to IP protection." But most of us are not anti-copyright; we just think enough is enough, and that the menu of enforcement tools Congress has already given to copyright holders is more than sufficient. We're tired of the constantly increasing copyright enforcement efforts because most of the costs of the "mistakes along the way" fall on innocent consumers, innovators, and taxpayers.

Timothy B. Lee / Timothy covers tech policy for Ars, with a particular focus on patent and copyright law, privacy, free speech, and open government. His writing has appeared in Slate, Reason, Wired, and the New York Times.